Art of the magazine interview may be dying, as writer laments, or maybe it just changed venues

David Kipen

Published
4:00 am PDT, Tuesday, August 24, 2004

If interviewing is an art, as the title of Lawrence Grobel's harmlessly readable new book suggests, the state of it is hard to reckon. The author of books about Brando, Capote, the Huston family and others, Grobel justifiably kvetches that the dumbed-down, space-squeezed magazine interview of today is "sick. Anemic. Compromised."

On the other hand, people regularly pay good money at City Arts & Lectures or the Commonwealth Club just to hear a decent public conversation. And Hyperion has high hopes next month for "All I Did Was Ask," a hardcover anthology of interviews by the polymathic "Fresh Air" host Terry Gross -- a book of radio chats that people could just as easily hear again online for free. (Where, oh where, is the anthology culled from the dozen or so years before "Fresh Air" went national?)

Back on the debit side of the ledger, C-SPAN just declined to find a replacement for departing "Booknotes" host Brian Lamb, who finally begged off after 15 years of eyestrain. But on the credit side, Lamb will start a general-interest interview show on C-SPAN Dec. 12 called "Q & A," where one hopes he'll finally get over his fiction allergy.

On closer inspection, the in-depth interview isn't dead, just fled from glossies to the headier air of public radio, trade publishing and cable TV. All of which, in 2004, makes Grobel's primer about as necessary as a book about buggy-whip technique might have been a hundred years ago. "The Art of the Interview" is a Baedeker to a continent that was already sinking beneath the waves when Clay Felker left off editing New West.

Still, if a reader comes to "The Art of the Interview" looking for war stories instead of career counseling, there may yet be a few nuggets in it. Grobel's chapter soliciting wisdom from editors at Rolling Stone, Details, Us, Playboy, Penthouse, Movieline and other outlets compels attention, if only for the light it sheds on why general-interest magazines are so bad nowadays. (Hint: Advertising is soft, publicists are hard and most magazine hands assume that readers' attention spans are as short as theirs.)

Perhaps as a consequence, Grobel's roundtable bull session with his fellow scribes consistently provokes and amuses. When he asks them for any stock questions that they ask of everybody, Kristine McKenna ponies up with, "Why does love die?" Is it any wonder that the always empathic McKenna has just published her second widely welcomed collection of interviews, "Talk to Her" (Fantagraphics), while Grobel is stuck writing how-to books for a lost art?

Alas, most of "The Art of the Interview" is taken up with outtakes and object lessons from Grobel's Hollywood interviews. From a promotional standpoint, this may look like a wise decision, but to people who actually buy books or at least read book reviews, writers would have been the bigger draw. Grobel's a literate guy, an erstwhile poet who's also interviewed Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, J.P. Donleavy and a slew of other writers. (Donleavy contributes the introduction, with all the obsequious haste of a man jotting a thank-you note for a gift he hasn't decided whether to keep. ) A little less Barbra and a little more Bellow might have gone a long way.

It doesn't help either that, in the same paragraph, Grobel mistakes the movie "Bedtime Story" for its remake, "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," and identifies "Glengarry Glen Ross" as "a classic screenplay on the salesman's life," as if the underlying play counted for naught. We also get the full 70- page transcript of Grobel's interview with, out of all the interesting people he's grilled, ex-Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight. This, on top of the dozen pages of questions Grobel armed himself with to interrogate Drew Barrymore. Sample: "Was 'Duplex' at all a stretch for you?"

All in all, Grobel is very good at what he does and not bad at explaining it. He writes a breezy, unremarkable, only occasionally embarrassing prose, the style of someone used to writing the parts that magazine readers tend to skip. May he soon sell another single-subject book proposal like "The Hustons" (the Reiners come to mind), and get out of a magazine game he's long since outgrown.

The only newsworthy aside in Grobel's book comes in the chapter where he convenes that tar pit full of magazine profilers to discuss the ins and outs of Q and A. McKenna chimes in knowledgeably here, as does David Rensin, co- author of Tim Allen's "Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man." (Does this make Rensin the Boswell to Tim Allen's johnson?)

What's intriguing here is that Rensin is also identified as co-author of a 2003 book about the 1936 Olympian, World War II castaway and prisoner of war Louis Zamperini. This might not warrant mention if "Seabiscuit" biographer Laura Hillenbrand hadn't just announced Zamperini as the subject of her eagerly awaited next book. Heaven knows Hillenbrand's gifted enough to make any topic her own, but a second book on the same born-again war hero? Aren't there enough never-attempted biographical subjects to go around?